With bursting bellies and raging sugar highs, we waddled to the door, Dad leading the victory parade, T-shirt draped proudly across his shoulder like a sash. I scanned the parlor for Tasha, hoping to at least say goodbye before we left, but she’d slipped away while we were studying our dead grandfather’s third clue. George said she was in the back on the phone and asked me if he should go get her.
Papa Kwirk would have said yes. Heck, Papa Kwirk would have leaped over the counter and gone back to the kitchen to say goodbye himself. Papa Kwirk once jumped a metal fence and stole a stuffed bear to get a girl to like him. He conquered Mount Everest just to impress her.
Of course, then he tossed his cookies and cream. My stomach was already a gurgling volcano barely lying dormant. Maybe better not to push it.
“Just tell her the charming guy with the whipped cream on his forehead said it was nice to meet her. And I hope we see each other again sometime. I mean, like, again again.”
“Sure, man. Whatever.” George started to walk away, carrying a stack of menus in one hand and his cowbell in the other.
“Maybe leave out the ‘charming’ part,” I called after him, starting to doubt myself, suddenly thinking that Tasha was just being polite, talking to me only because she liked my grandfather, and because you can’t be mean to a kid who has recently lost someone close to them. “And all the ‘again’ stuff,” I added. “Know what? Just tell her Rion says bye.”
I slipped out the door before I could make a bigger fool of myself.
Outside, Cass was repeating the last clue over and over. The girl could memorize speeches from Shakespeare, so a one-line riddle should pose no problems. Dad didn’t ask if he could take the photo of our grandparents on their first date; Papa Kwirk had earned his spot on the wall, after all, and he deserved to keep it. Instead, my father just used the thumbtack George gave him to put our family picture right next to my teenage grandparents.
I wondered what he made of it—that photo. Obviously, Papa Kwirk was trying to tell us something. What did fishing, Garbage Pail Kids, ice-cream mountains, and first dates have in common? I would have asked, but Dad seemed just as puzzled by the whole thing.
Puzzled and a little green, as if he could be sick again any minute. Mom looked the same.
Lyra, on the other hand, bounced like Tigger as we walked back to the car, her pigtails flopping. “That was epic,” she said, skipping circles around us. “We should totally do that again sometime.”
“I think that’s a terrible idea,” Mom said. “Conquering Everest is a once-in-a-lifetime experience.”
Cass slowed down to walk next to me. “Well, she sure is pretty.”
“Who?” I said, playing dumb, hoping she’d drop it. I should have known better.
“Tasha, right? The one from the funeral—sorry, funneral,” Cass corrected herself.
“Yeah, I guess,” I said, trying to sound disinterested. Never, ever admit to your sister that you think somebody’s cute. Especially if your sister is anything like Cassiopeia Kwirk, Queen of Storybook Romances, Cataloger of Crushes Real and Imagined. She will ship you faster than FedEx.
“You guess,” Cass repeated, grabbing hold of my arm with both hands. “C’mon. Admit it. You were totally into her. And when she wiped the whipped cream off your face? The look you got? Sooo smitten.”
I shook off her hand and tried to put some distance between us, but it was too late. Like sharks sniffing out a bloated whale carcass, she was quickly joined by her own kind. “Who’s smitten?” Lyra asked, her ears pricking, skipping up beside us.
“Ri was swooning over that girl at the restaurant.”
“I was not swooning,” I snapped.
“You were totally swooning,” Cass insisted.
“I don’t swoon. You swoon.”
“Pfff. When have I ever swooned?”
“Are you kidding?” I spat. “You’re like the world’s foremost authority on swooning. You swoon when you see a pair of shoes you like. You swoon over characters in books. You swoon at movie previews. You’re a total swooner.”
“Swooner’s not a word,” Lyra informed us.
“Don’t try to change the subject.” Cass smiled her showbiz smile. “I saw you back there. It was total swoonage. You were one big swoonball.”
“Swoonface,” I shot back.
“Swoonhead.”
“Swoonbag.”
“Swoon-for-brains.”
I got right up in her face. “Swoony McSwoonsalot who lives in Swoonsville and eats Swoonios for breakfast thinks she’s so friggin’ swoontastic that the whole swoony world swoons at her stupid swoony feet.”
“I am rather swoontastic,” Cass admitted, mock-admiring her nails.
I punched her in the arm, not near as hard as I could.
“Ouch!” she said, and punched me back. Really hard. A lot harder than I expected. Who knew my sister with her Pixy Stix arms had a fist like a sledgehammer? I resisted the urge to hike up the sleeve of my shirt, even though I was sure a bruise was already blossoming there.
“You two need to grow up,” Lyra said. “So juvenile.”
We reached the parking lot and all piled into the car, me rubbing my arm as I crawled into the back to get away from Cass, who was still batting her eyelashes at me. Up front, I overheard Mom ask Dad, “Do you even know where you’re going?”
“You mean do I know the way to the magic tree?” Dad replied with a snort. “If it’s the one I’m thinking of, I know where it used to be. But that was thirty years ago.” He started the car, his fingers tapping on the wheel. The one he was thinking of? How many magic trees could there be in Bumtussle, Illinois?
“You know, there’s this one group of people who live near Manila who bury their dead in hollowed-out tree trunks,” Lyra informed us. “You even get to pick out your own tree before you die.”
“That’s nice, sweetie,” Mom said.
“Better than being eaten by vultures,” Dad remarked.
“Or by your own family,” I added.
In the seat in front of me, Cass mumbled, “Oh, Tasha,” pressed her hand to her forehead, and pretended to faint.
If I’m being honest, I wasn’t that surprised by there being a third clue at the top of the Mountain (or the bottom, depending on how you looked at it). Disappointed, but not surprised. I seriously doubted we would find Papa Kwirk at Mallory’s.
For starters, an ice-cream parlor seemed an unlikely place to store a cremated body; surely it constituted some kind of health code violation—though then we could have said that he had been “ice cremated,” which is the kind of joke my dad would make. Mostly, though, I’d seen enough movies to know that no quest is ever completed after only two steps. First the tackle box. Then the photo from his first date with Grandma Shelley. There was an equation here, but we didn’t have all the variables yet. I wasn’t sure what it would all add up to in the end, but I knew it couldn’t be solved so easily.
No surprise, then, that he wasn’t hidden in the salt and pepper shakers at Mallory’s, but I could imagine Papa Kwirk waiting for us at a “magic” tree. I know there’s no such thing, of course, except for the one in those books about the time-traveling siblings that I read when I was little. Jack and Annie getting chased by saber-toothed tigers and ninja assassins. Those books were so unrealistic; there was no way a brother and sister could spend that much time together and not kill each other. If I ever traveled back to ancient Egypt with Cass, I’d leave her there.
Dad insisted there was a magic tree in Greenburg, though, at a place called Polk Park. Mom fed him directions from her phone while I stared out the window and tried not to think about Tasha Meeks. Honestly, I could still feel the little jolt from where she’d touched my eyebrow, though not as keenly as I felt the imprint of my sister’s fist on my arm.
It was probably better that I hadn’t said goodbye. Sure, she liked my grandfather, but he’d been a part of her life. Besides, he rode a motorcycle and had war scars and tattoos and played poker. The rest of my family sniffed candles, kept snakes as pets, and gorged ourselves on ice cream. Not to mention—who manages to get whipped cream on their forehead?
“You’re messing with your eyebrow again,” Lyra said, staring at me. I put my hands in my lap and ignored her smirking until Dad told us that we’d arrived.
Polk Park wasn’t very busy, though once I got a good look at it, I was surprised there was anyone there at all.
“I haven’t been here in ages,” Dad said.
It looked like the park had been around for ages. An ancient playground stood off to the right, with an old metal slide and four weathered swings, one of which hung down to the grass by only one hook and another had been twisted so much that its chain made an impossible knot. There was a balance beam, rusted, and a sandbox filled with weeds. The three smaller kids I spotted on the playground avoided all of these, choosing to share the rickety-looking roundabout that squealed when it spun. Their parents stared at their phones on nearby benches.
The place didn’t look too magical to me.
The park had a huge field, at least, which seemed to be the only thing about it that wasn’t in disrepair. The grassy area was studded with big oak trees providing pockets of shade, though nothing about them struck me as being particularly magical either. None stood out as being the tallest or grandest, or shimmering with some kind of glittery, ethereal glow. There were no Jack and Annie style tree houses to be seen.
But Dad seemed to know what he was doing. He walked purposefully toward the field, Mom and Lyra following on his heels. I stopped to read the bronze plaque that stood at the entrance, thinking maybe it would help if I knew a little bit more about the place. The plaque said that the park had been made in honor of James Knox Polk, the eleventh president of the United States. There was an engraved picture of Mr. Polk looking unhappy, though all presidents looked unhappy to me. Probably came with the job.
“Is that a mullet?” Cass said, coming up behind me.
“Yeah. Maybe,” I said, bending down to inspect President Polk’s hairdo. I didn’t know presidents wore mullets, though maybe being president entitled you to have dumb-looking hair too.
“I’ve never even heard of this guy.”
“Me neither,” I said. He wasn’t on a coin or a bill or Mount Rushmore. None of the schools I ever went to were named after him. But he was on a bronze plaque commemorating a patch of weedy grass in the middle of Greenburg, Illinois.
Lucky him.
Cass ran her finger along the engraved outline of Polk’s face. “Don’t you think it’s funny, how you can be the president of the United States and still be forgotten by almost everybody? I mean, more people probably know who Justin Bieber is than this guy.”
My sister had had a crush on Justin Bieber when she was ten. T-shirts, posters, everything. It was sad. Even Prince Teldar was a step up, in my opinion.
Cass was right, though. This guy had been president—probably had his name on plenty of laws and libraries and stuff—and I knew nothing about him. It made you think about all the people in the world who won’t be remembered at all after they’re gone, who leave nothing lasting behind. Probably that’s most of us.
I’m not sure if I’d ever had a more depressing thought in my life.
Cass poked me in the shoulder. “Hey, sorry about the whole swooner thing,” she said, squinting in the sun. “That was uncalled-for.”
I stood there and blinked at her, not sure I’d heard her right. Cass had apologized to me before, but always with a parent looking over her shoulder, making sure it was done with the suitable amount of forced authenticity. In those cases, I was usually expected to make the same fake apology back. Except Cass could fake being remorseful much better than I could. “Hold up. Did you just apologize? Like, for real?”
“I can take it back,” she said.
I raised my hands. “Nope. Too late. Apology accepted.”
We both went back to admiring President Polk’s mullet.
“I’m sorry I punched you so hard,” I mumbled.
“It wasn’t really that hard,” Cass said with a shrug.
“Neither was yours,” I lied.
From halfway across the field, Lyra yelled at us to hurry up.
Dad had apparently found his magic tree.
We arrived to find the rest of our family standing around a large oak, lording over its own little patch of wildflowers. It was one of the tallest of the bunch, with a thick, gnarly trunk and stocky branches that twisted and crisscrossed, creating a lattice that seemed perfect for climbing. The end of a mild winter had coaxed the tree’s leaves out a little early, but you could still trace a path up the limbs with your eyes.
There were carvings in the trunk near the base. M.T. hearted J.S. Shawn B. was a jerk. Mike was here. But there were no initials we recognized. No Frank loves Shelley. No Welcome to the magic tree. No This way to Egypt.
“Doesn’t look so special to me,” Lyra said.
“No. Not to you,” Dad said, putting one hand on it. “We used to come here on Sundays when I was little, while everyone else was at church. Mom packed a picnic, and we’d find a spot here in the shade, far enough from the playground that Frank could have some peace and quiet to read the Sunday paper. He and Mom would sit and do the crossword together.”
“What makes it magic?” Cass asked, studying the tree.
“Your grandmother called it that because I used to climb up into it and disappear.”
“Wait a minute,” Mom said. “This is that tree?”
My sisters and I looked at each other. Clearly there was another story here. Another piece from the puzzle of my father’s foggy childhood that he’d apparently shared with Mom but not with us.
“When your father was a little boy, he broke his arm falling out of this tree,” she explained.
“I wasn’t that little,” Dad countered. “I was eight. And it wasn’t my fault. A branch snapped. I broke both the bones in my forearm, right here.” He pointed to a spot halfway between his right wrist and elbow.
“You? Climbed that?” I pointed to him and then to the big oak. I’d never pictured my father as a tree climber. It just seemed a little too daring for a chemist who only drove the speed limit and kept a stack of Scientific Americans on the back of the toilet.
Dad nodded. “Probably a hundred times. Until the one time your grandmother wasn’t watching. She’d gone back to the car to get something, and Frank was stuck in his paper. I was up there, calling down to him, trying to get his attention, and snap.” Dad slapped his hands together, causing Lyra to jump. “I had to wear a cast for eight weeks. Got me out of PE, at least.” Dad looked up at the tree and shook his head. “We still came back to this park every other Sunday or so, but that was the last time I ever tried climbing it.”
“And it’s still going to be the last time,” Mom said.
“Come on, Moll. That’s the whole reason we’re here. This is the tree.”
“But didn’t you just say how you almost died the last time? And you probably weighed seventy pounds then. And now you weigh . . . what? A hundred and seventy?”
“One sixty-three,” Dad corrected.
Mom shot him a look.
“Okay. One sixty-seven.”
While Mom and Dad “debated,” I circled around to the other side and found the lowest branch, which I could just jump up and grab. From there it was a stretch to get to the next, but after that it would be just like climbing a ladder. I couldn’t see anything special from down here, but that didn’t mean that there wasn’t something hidden up there. Another clue, maybe. Some little bit of Papa Kwirk. I leaped and grabbed that first thick handhold, my feet scrambling up the trunk. My parents continued to jabber at each other.
“Let’s just call the fire department.”
“Really, Molly? You want to call the fire department and explain how we think my dead dad left a clue to his missing body hidden in the top of a tree in the middle of a public park?”
“Okay, maybe not. But I also don’t think that at your age you should be climbing fifty-foot-tall trees either. You know how I feel about—” My mother stopped, suddenly realizing where I was . . . already fifteen feet off the ground. “Rion Kwirk! You get down from there right this minute!”
I pressed close to the trunk, methodically working my way to the top, branch by branch. “Don’t worry, Mom. I got this,” I called down. I looked around for something, anything. A message from Papa Kwirk. Maybe something etched into the tree itself. Another scrap of paper nailed into the trunk or a photograph nestled in the leaves. I circled around as much as possible, worried that I would miss something on the other side as I climbed. The tree was so thick, I couldn’t even wrap my arms around it.
“I’m going up too,” I heard Lyra say, followed by the grunts of her trying to jump up to the first branch, but there was no way Mom was going to let more than one of us break our neck. Finally, I thought, something I can do that my sisters can’t.
Thirty feet up now. The branches were getting thinner, some of them bending underfoot. I knew I wouldn’t be able to go too much higher.
“Be careful!” Dad commanded, somehow sounding just as panicked as Mom.
I was high enough now that looking down made me dizzy. More concerning, though, was that there was nothing up here. Maybe Dad had the wrong tree. Or we were thinking about the clue the wrong way.
That’s when I spotted it, on the other side of the trunk. Something that clearly didn’t belong: a ziplock bag impaled on an upturned branch, just dangling there like ripe fruit.
“I think I found something!” I stretched for another branch and pulled myself a little closer. “It’s a book.” I could see the cover through the plastic now. “Bridge to Terabithia.” There was no immediate response from below. I glanced down to see the tops of everyone’s heads, so far away.
Finally Dad’s voice floated up to me. “Can you reach it safely? If you can reach it, just drop it, then come back down slowly.” He even said the word “slowly” slowly.
“I think so!” I shouted. Provided I could wiggle it off the branch it was stuck to. My left hand had a death grip on a branch above, leaving me one free hand to work. I scooched around the tree and out on the limb, shuffling by centimeters. God, it was a long way down. I felt a leaf tickle my ear. Another branch poked me in the side. I managed a couple more inches, just enough to take hold of the bag. One good tug should do it.
“Rion, please be careful!” My mother was practically screeching now.
One. Good. Tug.
The bag ripped free, causing everything under me to shift. My foot slipped and suddenly I felt woozy, one leg hovering over nothing. The book slid out of my hand and heard it thwip and thwack as it tumbled through the branches below me. Not wanting to follow it down, I grasped madly for another branch to steady myself, finding a second, even skinnier limb for my dangling left foot to rest on.
I hugged the tree like it was a girl in a blue-and-orange dress.
“Rion!” Mom’s voice. Dad’s voice. Even Cass’s voice.
“It’s all right. I’m okay,” I called down. “I’m coming down now.”
I looked around for the easiest possible path when I noticed something else. Something I’d missed on the climb up, nestled between two branches. It looked like a giant Christmas ornament. Or like a cocoon, made out of papier-mâché. With a hole in it.
And something crawling out of that hole.
I heard a buzz in my left ear, followed by something landing on the back of my neck. I let go of the branch to swat it away.
Not my smartest move.
I am not allergic to bees. My mother is allergic to bees. But she is also allergic to dust mites and latex and mangos. Getting stung by one bee wouldn’t have killed me.
Falling forty feet out of a tree, on the other hand . . .
I wasn’t sure if the thing that landed on my neck was even a bee. All I know was that I panicked and slapped at it with the hand that had the surer grip. I felt the other branch snap off in my left hand, felt both of my feet slip out from underneath me, heard a bad word, a Papa Kwirk kind of word, slip from my lips, followed by my mother’s shouting and the fwip fwip fwip of leaves brushing my ears. I felt the sting of smaller branches snagging my shirt, others bending beneath me, until I hit one big enough to stop me, my legs curling around it, hands groping for anything solid to hold on to.
I was hanging upside down, fifteen feet from the ground, my sweaty T-shirt falling over my face, blocking most of my view. I reached up, cursing my gym teacher for not making me do more sit-ups, trying to get one hand on the branch that had caught me, when I heard Dad’s voice.
“It’s all right, Rion. Just drop. I’ve got you.”
I looked straight down, past my shirt, to see Dad standing right underneath me with his arms stretched out.
I shook my head. Fifteen feet was still a long way, and my father wasn’t exactly a Master of the Universe. If it came down to it, I’m pretty sure Mom could take him in an arm-wrestling contest. There had to be a better way. “That’s okay. I’ve got this,” I said. I so didn’t have it.
“I’m right here,” he said, his voice suddenly calm.
He was right. But I had an image of my father lying in the grass, screaming and cradling his broken arm, Papa Kwirk running up to him, ten seconds too late. Saying you’ll do something and actually doing it are two different things.
I could feel my legs slipping. I couldn’t hang on. I looked back at Dad.
“I’ll catch you,” he said again. “I promise.”
He promised.
I dropped.
We both hit the ground with a whoomph, Dad on the bottom sprawled across the grass, me an awkward bundle of splayed limbs in his arms. The air whooshed out of my lungs. I felt Dad’s arms entwined with my legs, under my neck, my face pressed to his armpit, my elbow digging into his stomach.
He had caught me.
Mostly.
Dad started making strange sounds: a high-pitched whistling, heaving wheezing. It took a second to realize he was laughing, and struggling with it because he could hardly breathe with me on top of him. Mom was suddenly in my face, pulling me to my feet.
“Are you hurt? Can you see? Are you dizzy? How many fingers am I holding up? Oh my god, you’re BLEEDING!”
I reached up to my cheek. There was a little scratch there from where a branch must have grazed me. “I’m all right, Mom,” I said. “It’s him you should worry about.” I pointed at Dad, who still lay there in the grass, looking up at the magic tree with laughing tears in his eyes.
The tree that could make you disappear could also make you reappear. Suddenly. In your father’s arms.
Ta-da.
Cass looked at me and shook her head. “Such a swooner.”
Ten minutes later, we were on the playground. Cass and Lyra took over the two working swings while Mom broke out the emergency medical kit. The Bag of Holding came equipped with bandages, gauze, tape, antiseptic cleansing wipes, cotton swabs, a pair of gloves (latex-free), and a disposable poncho. Not to mention the bottle of Bactine that she was spraying the cuts on my arm with, even though they were barely bleeding.
“I’m okay,” I tried to assure her.
“You’re okay when I say you’re okay. You have sticks in your hair.” She picked one out and showed it to me.
“Maybe we should go to the emergency room, then,” I said. “We can have them surgically removed.”
“Stop being such a smarty-pants. You almost gave me a heart attack.” The moment she said it, we both glanced at Dad to see if he’d heard, but he was distracted. “Bad choice of words.” Mom found the smallest bandage she could for the cut on my cheek and I let her stick it on, vowing to tear it off the moment her back was turned.
Dad was sitting two benches away, the torn plastic bag at his feet, the treasure it contained in his hands. I managed to escape from Mom while she was stuffing her traveling hospital back into her bag and took the space next to him.
“All patched up?” he asked.
I nodded. “Good as new. So what’s this book that I risked my life for?”
Dad held it up for me to see. “Bridge to Terabithia? It’s kind of a classic,” he said, squinting at the cover. “This was the book your grandmother and I were reading together when, you know . . .”
Dad trailed off. Were reading. Not read. They’d had to stop in the middle. He didn’t need to explain.
“Afterward, I just couldn’t bring myself to pick it back up,” Dad continued. “I tossed it on my shelf and ignored it. I assumed Frank just threw it out with the rest of my stuff.”
Like the Garbage Pail Kids cards currently still scattered across Aunt Gertie’s kitchen floor. Dad assumed Papa Kwirk had trashed it all, or sold it at a yard sale, or taken it to Goodwill, but that wasn’t turning out to be the case. It seemed Papa Kwirk had held on to more than we thought. The question was Why?
“Don’t see what I’m supposed to do with it now, though,” Dad mumbled. “There are no photos tucked inside. Nothing written on the flaps. No dedication or anything.”
I reached up to my hair and picked out a leaf that my mother had somehow missed, pressing it between two fingers, feeling how smooth it was, like the cover of Dad’s book. Look for me in the magic tree, hidden among the leaves.
Leaves.
I snatched the book from Dad’s hands, ignoring his shocked look as I started flipping through the pages. Leafing through the pages. It took only a second to find what I was looking for. On the fourth page. “Look,” I said, pointing. The letter K in the word “kid” was circled in pencil. There was another one on page six. The O in “grasshoppers.” Flipping through, I noticed more letters with circles around them.
“Quick. Ask Mom if she has a piece of paper and a pen.” It was a dumb question. Odds are she had a whole pack of Bics and three spiral-bound notebooks in that purse of hers. Dad skipped the asking part and just starting digging through the Bag of Holding. My sisters, noticing the sudden commotion by our bench, left their spots on the swings and came up behind me.
“What did you find?” Cass asked.
“Letters,” I said, taking the pad of paper and pencil Dad handed me.
“Wow. Letters. In a book, no less. You are a genius,” Cass smarted off, but then she saw me copying the circled letters down, carefully flipping from page to page, making sure I didn’t miss one. There were four in chapter one. Three in chapter two. Two in chapter three. My family huddled around me as I sat on the bench, methodically working my way through Dad’s old book, shouting when they spotted one before I could.
Cass started to get excited. “This is just like the time Elsalore has to decipher the password to get into Lord Blackheart’s fortress.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Just like that.”
The last chapter had four more circled letters: N, I, A, and M.
I stared at what I had written in the notebook.
KOLOORFEMNIHETTOTBOMFOETHLEBOTTNOILLWOWDANNIAM
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I looked at Dad, who shrugged.
Lyra leaned over me, her chin practically resting on my head. “Wait. There were only a certain number of letters per chapter, right? So don’t try to read them all at once. Break them up the way you found them.”
“Yeah, maybe,” I said. It was worth a shot. I went back through each chapter, putting a slash in between the letters that marked the end of one chapter and the start of the next. When I’d finished, I read the whole thing out loud, stumbling over the unfamiliar sounds.
“Kolo orf em ni het totbom fo eth lebott no illwow dan niam.”
“Well, that clears things right up,” Mom said.
“What’s a totbom?” Cass asked.
“Maybe it’s Vietnamese?” I suggested. After all, Papa Kwirk had taught me a few Vietnamese phrases from his time over there, though most of them were dirty and I was sworn not to repeat them around Mom or Dad.
Lyra groaned and plucked the notebook out of my hands. “Come on, people,” she said. “That’s not Vietnamese. Don’t you get it? It’s a jumble.”
“You’re a jumble,” I said, slightly miffed at her grabbiness, even though I’d done the same thing to Dad only minutes ago.
“No. See?” she said, and then she started scribbling in the notebook we’d taken from my mother’s purse, rearranging the new groups of letters to make actual words. English ones. She worked quickly with her tongue poking out of the corner of her mouth and got hung up only once, on illwow, but then Cass, who was standing next to her, whispered, “Willow.” The rest fell quickly into place.
Lyra held the notebook up proudly. “‘Look for me in the bottom of the bottle on Willow and Main,’” she read.
Dad wrapped his arms around her, squeezing her tight. “You . . . are a genius,” he said. Except, unlike Cass, he actually meant it.
And it was probably true. Lyra probably was a genius.
But if it wasn’t for me, we wouldn’t even have the book in the first place.